The acquisition creates the industry’s first AI-Ready Operating Platform – unifying transactions, analytics and in-memory speed to eliminate infrastructure fragmentation
MariaDB plc announced the successful completion of its acquisition of GridGain Systems, Inc., the pioneer of in-memory computing and the force behind Apache Ignite. This strategic acquisition marks MariaDB’s move towards delivery of an AI-Ready Operating Platform, a unified system designed to handle the extreme-velocity data requirements of autonomous AI agents.
We are excited to see GridGain become a foundational part of MariaDB, offering a unified platform that can support the next generation of autonomous and data-intensive workflows across the industries we serve.
As enterprises transition from simple AI assistants to autonomous agentic systems that reason and act, traditional data layers are reaching a breaking point. By integrating GridGain’s in-memory technology, MariaDB now provides a single, high-velocity, persistent grounding layer that supports the entire AI lifecycle – from real-time data ingestion to complex reasoning.
“For the last 18 months, we have been building MariaDB for the agentic era,” said Rohit de Souza, CEO of MariaDB. “By bringing GridGain into the fold, we are delivering a unified platform that does the heavy lifting for the enterprise. We are removing the friction of manual data assembly and defining the high-velocity grounding layer that AI agents need to be truly useful – all backed by integrated support from a single company.”
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Solving the Agentic Gap
The urgency for this platform is backed by industry shifts. Gartner® predicts, “40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by 2026 – up from less than 5% in 2025.”¹ Without a high-quality data foundation, “IDC warns that by 2027, companies that fail to establish high-quality, AI-ready data foundations will suffer a 15% productivity loss as generative and agentic systems falter” (IDC FutureScape 2026; Category: Worldwide Agentic Artificial Intelligence; Prediction 1).
MariaDB’s new platform addresses this inflection point by consolidating previously fragmented layers:
- Unified transactions & analytics: Run real-time analytics alongside live transactions on the same platform without the friction of ETL (extract, transform, load).
- In-memory velocity: Leveraging GridGain’s expertise to provide sub-millisecond response times for agentic workloads.
- Natively AI ready: Built-in vector capabilities to store, index and query embeddings, along with MCP server and integrations to AI frameworks, essential for building RAG workloads.
- Global scale: Technology to support AI deployments across hybrid and multicloud environments, with instant scaling.
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The Agentic Shift: No Assembly Required
Instead of forcing developers to manually stitch together separate databases for memory, vector search and transactions, MariaDB now offers a “single pane of glass” for data. This reduces complexity, lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) and allows developers to focus on building agent logic rather than managing backend bottlenecks.
“Building for this level of scale today is like trying to build a high-speed machine out of a bucket of LEGOs – you have the pieces, but none of the pieces were meant to fit together under that kind of intensity,” said Vikas Mathur, chief product officer at MariaDB plc. “At AI-speed, the window for a response shrinks. A data platform like MariaDB no longer has seconds; it has single-digit milliseconds to deliver answers to agents. By providing a platform with a high-speed in-memory ‘baseplate’ already built-in, we eliminate the friction of manual assembly. We are giving developers a unified grounding layer that can handle the massive scale these agents demand.”